A Call from Africa

I heard from Bill! He borrowed a cell phone from a bartender (who would ever think BOTB would hang out in a bar??). It gave us about 30 seconds of time before it ran out. All I heard was, "Our van broke down and I have hives." Click, hmmmmmmmmm. Oh, good. I was already a mess before that.
Then, mercifully, the phone rang again. He was on a million-rand-a-minute lodge phone. The van broke down, but they were just going to stay another night at this lodge at Mkuzi (great spot). He had hives but they only itched some. They had seen the Big Five (lion, leopard, Cape buffalo, black rhino, and ....dunno...giraffe? No. Elephant!) in only two hours today. Whew. The Big Five designation is kind of a trophy hunter's thing. I prefer to think that he saw some really special animals. My Big Five would be something like Cape hunting dog, gerenuk, ostrich, sable antelope, and meerkat, but then I'm not necessarily after the mainstream stuff.

He said the weather was great, warm during the day and cool at night. It's winter down there, so that's something. (I froze my tuchis off when I was there in July 1994--would you believe temps in the 20's at night? I wore absolutely everything I brought and was still cold).

I caught him up on events around here--copperheads, who hatched, how the kids are, all the work I've been doing...and then it was time to say goodbye. It was good to be hitched back up to my heart-lung machine, if at great expense and only for a little while.

I found a picture of us, taken in March, 2005. We're sitting atop a Mayan pyramid in Mexico. I'm kind of leery of heights but he talked me into climbing it. (Not the first good thing he's ever talked me into. Bill is really good at talking girls into things.) The humid forest stretches out for miles behind us, a couple of other temples poking up out of it. We look so happy and peaceful. Like there's nowhere else on earth we'd rather be, no one else we'd rather be with. Today I stuck the photo on my Mac monitor, where I can keep that vision in the front of my mind. It won't be long now, and we'll be able to pick up where we left off.